Something (else)

Version 1
Something about mispronouncing words and rolling bad joints and forgetting how to speak the first language I heard. Something about being a contradiction, a hypocrite, a big fucking mouth and a liar. Something about slipping beneath the surface and the water always dripping down my neck and my heart always dancing to an unsteady beat with my lungs. Something about clichés.

Version 2
She is daddy’s little girl in a too short skirt, rolling joints in her parents’ bedroom, a hung over mess of broken bones and decaying potential, with eleven stories to tell (with words that get lost midair in a cloud of thick smoke) to another nameless boy with a pierced tongue. She screams “pointless, pointless”, arguing for a left world in a right state of mind, ignoring education, devouring privilege and pushing through one more day in a dreamless daze, for something more than four hours of sleep, one meal a day, menthol cigarettes and rooftop parties. Screaming “pointless, pointless” for revolutionaries, for decadence, for freedom, for money, for a cause, for a voice, for something to swallow whole and spit out in seventeen brittle pieces, for memory and communication and a name, for something to say in a world free of constraints, expectations, restraints, for a face to recognise, for some sort of future, for today, for an ounce to cut up on clean white sheets, for legs and lips and metal rings, for something to point out, for something pointless.

By Ivana Rnjak